They Buried My Bike With Me But My Son Found My Letters

From wherever I am now, I saw it all — my body on the rain-slick asphalt, my Harley Davidson Road King lying twenty feet away, oil and blood mingling in the dark. The paramedics didn’t even try. Nobody survives getting flattened by an 18-wheeler.

I’d ridden for fifty-three years. Started at sixteen, back when helmets were for sissies and you could open up on the highway. My last thought before the truck hit wasn’t fear — it was anger. At my son for not calling. At riding alone. Again.

The funeral surprised me. I expected a dozen old buddies, some beers poured out, a few stories. Instead, three hundred bikes roared in, engines thundering like a storm. Weathered faces, tears no one tried to hide.

But my son, Jack, wasn’t there.

We hadn’t spoken in seven years, since the night I called his fiancée a gold-digger, whiskey making me cruel. Words that broke us.

They buried me with my bike. Cut the hole deep, dropped in the Harley, then my casket. Should’ve been the end. Sixty-nine years. Widowed at forty-two. Estranged from my boy. A mechanic who could coax life from any engine but couldn’t fix his own family.

Then, three months later, Jack came to my grave.

He parked his BMW — a car, not a bike — and brought my old leather jacket. The one I’d left him in my will. He talked to my stone like I was there. Told me he found my journals. Read about my pride in him, my lonely nights, the calls he never returned.

“I have a son,” he said quietly. “Four years old. Named him Raymond.”

He promised to learn to ride. To keep the shop open. To start teaching little Raymond early, like I did with him.

Years passed. Jack kept his word. The shop thrived. Riley, my apprentice, taught Jack to ride. Every death anniversary, the bikes still came, engines roaring tribute. And every year, at sunset, Jack came alone to talk.

Then one visit, three years in, he brought a letter. Found hidden in the Triumph I’d rebuilt for him.

In it, I told him everything I couldn’t say in life. How I loved him. How proud I was. How the bike was my apology and my hope for one last ride together.

Jack read it aloud. Told me he almost called me the day I died, but a client called first.

He said Raymond insisted on a leather jacket for kindergarten. That the shop was expanding. That he was renaming it *Wilson & Son Motorcycles*. That he’d be back next week, to read journal entries to his boy.

As he walked away, I felt something shift. The thing tethering me here wasn’t my Harley. It was love — messy, stubborn, imperfect love that lived in old toolboxes and hidden letters, and somehow survived.

The stars came out. I felt myself finally letting go. Somewhere beyond, I heard a familiar engine rumble.

Time to ride on.